Victorian

Christoffer Gammad
Dr. Frank Fennel
4/25/2013
Out with the Old in with the New

The Victorian Age transformed the minds of the people of Europe. It challenged the ideas and views they came to understand, it created uproars of movements and different bodies of thinking. The growth of an age can be seen through the people who’ve lived through it and how their lives have changed. England quickly became a developing world power with these movements. During the span of this semester, we have studied and learned how this change came to be. We studied the literature of the period, the catalysts to forward and rational thinking, where people and writers alike sympathized with one another. Victorian literature is characterized by a strong sense of morality, frequently supporting the oppressed, whether it is women, children, or the poor. Ideas of economics, politics, science, philosophy, and the arts, all shaken, not stirred, within this ravaging time of upheaval. Charles Darwin ranted about his theory of evolution; Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote about nature contrasting with the supernatural, even an influential woman, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, exposed us to the wrongdoings of child labor. These individuals criticized the world they lived in, pondered the questions of morality and justice, and sought to change the ideas that their world believed to be right and just. The literature we have studied in this course became very influential to the times, and it even reflects back to us as readers. When we read Victorian literature, we put it into context we can only imagine, the social injustices, the abuse of power and the severe economic inequalities of the Victorian period. The Victorian period boasted many different types of genres, each contributing to the major changes that are happening in Victorian England. We focus on a major novel that characterizes a society based upon the people who inhabit it; we focus on George Elliot’s Middlemarch and its importance to the progress of the Victorian society. We can compare and contrast it to the some of works of Robert Browning, such as his “The Bishop Orders his Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church,” or the enlightening “Love Among the Ruins” and find similar identities within both author’s writings. Although both are different genres, Browning’s poetry and Elliot’s novel relay similar ideas, just in different ways. When we had read “Love Among the Ruins” by Browning, we described a binary between the city and the pastoral, complexity versus simplicity. As a modern reader, one can take this binary and ask the same question about our lives, which one is better? We live in a world of progressive technologies that allow us to communicate with each other instantly and from almost anywhere. But how does this technology affect our physical relationships with each other? Being able to text someone isn’t the same as hearing their voice, remembering how it sounds, and putting a face to that voice. But the speaker’s reluctance to side with one or the other shows that new sometimes isn’t better. “ Earth’s returns For whole centuries of folly, noise and sin! Shut them in, With their triumphs and their glories and the rest! Love is best” (80-84). In the end, the speaker chose love, which corresponds to the simplistic side of this binary. We can see a similar battle between old and new in Middlemarch, with Lydgate’s new methodology of medicine against the more established, old-fashioned doctors. In fact, the title of this section of the book is called “Old and Young,” raising a flag in my mind about binary of complex and simple. Lydgate’s character, a young surgeon, has been noted to be different, a “discoverer.” “The man was still in the making, as much as the Middlemarch Doctor and immortal discoverer, and there were both virtues and faults capable of shrinking or expanding” (Elliot). Old usually refers to something simpler, old technologies that are simple to use, whereas young can refer to new...

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...V
The Victorian period is one of the most popular eras studied and is well known for many things; from fashion to inventions, to the Industrial revolution to their education. Despite how much people like to think that they differ from them drastically, so much of our modern society depends on what they first created and the changes they set in motion. Many perspectives on how the Victorians lived their lives come from misconceptions given to in literature and education. A lot of stereotypes held are of their social classes; the upper class were snobbish and shallow, and the lower or working class were dirty, illiterate and uneducated. Two historic and popular novels that examine Victorian life are George Elliot’s Middlemarch and Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South; in both novels the writers try to portray the essence of the society as a whole, not merely of one class, sometimes more or less successfully than the other. The two texts both reinforce and contradict the clichéd representations of Victorian social class.
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I THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE NOVEL 2
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The...

...
Poor Victorian Children
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How old did children have to be to work in Victorian Times?
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-They worked very hard and for long hours every day. On the job safety was not a major concern and they were expected to work in filthy conditions many times. They really had no choice in the matter. Their parents made them work to help pay the bills at home.
What types of jobs did they do?
- They were considered cheap labor Victorian children were in high demand for many types of jobs including mining, factory work, street sweepers, clothing and hat makers, chimney sweeps, farming, textile mills, servants, and sadly, prostitution. As you may have already noticed, the British had very little regard for children.
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...only the year that
Queen Victoria acceded the throne, but also the year that a new literary
age was coined. The Victorian Age, more formally known, was a time of
great prosperity in Great Britain's literature. The Victorian Age produced a variety of changes. Political and social reform produced a variety of reading among all classes. The lower-class became more self-conscious, the middle class more powerful and the rich became more vulnerable. The novels of Charles Dickens, the poems of Alfred,
Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning, the dramatic plays of Oscar Wilde, the
scientific discoveries of the Darwins, and the religious revolt of Newman
all helped to enhance learning and literacy in the Victorian society. Of
all of the Literary eras, the Victorian age gave a new meaning to the word
controversy. Writers of that time challenged the ideas of religion, crime,
sexuality, chauvinism and over all social controversies.
Queen Victoria influenced the literary age herself. She loved to
read and she was educated in the finest schools in Great Britain. Queen Victoria encouraged reading among all of her people. She gave out free books to children and she built schools for the lower classes. Also the Queen invited prominent Victorian age writers such as Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Charles Dickens to read privately to her in Buckingham Palace.
The Victorian Age was also an era of...